I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think that they are not so much dazzled by millions as in the ’nineties; more anxious for simplicity of heart, which spells content, and worthiness of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one would guess from Wall Street or Broadway or public life in the Middle West. I think that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity, as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. If even thus far indifferentism should yield to active spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie would cease being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the triumph of the proletariate, since, if there was anything good in our old stock, we could convert them to it. But if the American has lost his religious instincts, if behind his practical common sense and his vigorous idealism and his eager experiments in spirituality there is nothing but a restless energy working upon the momentum of convictions long dead, then let the new Americans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out. With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to admit for a moment that conclusion of despair. CHAPTER VI LITERATURE IN AMERICA “Fix’t in sublimest thought behold them rise World after world unfolding to their eyes, Lead, light, allure them thro’ the total plan And give new guidance to the paths of man.” These were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807.